)

But by this logic you should open any hand UTG that is a 54% favorite over a random hand. This is would constitute a range of the top 45% of hands.

Are you really advocating playing 45% of hands UTG? Or is there something about this hand that makes it more playable than those the rest of slightly above average O8 hands?

If you are playing against someone that plays their blinds this badly and the game is generally tight, I would totally agree you should open this hand (as well as plenty of other somewhat marginal stuff).

Have you read thread or just last posts? Blockers

Never folding AA suited to an ace. We are rarely ever behind equity wise no matter the number of players.

If table is loose, we still have overPair + nfd equity. We gain big io on the nfd.

If table is tight, over pair gains value.

If someone 3bs, that's gravy. We are usually an equity favorite and there's dead money. Interestingly, that can create an instance of implicit collusion where both parties benefit.

A little revenge porn for you all!

Played with Villain again this weekend. Apparently he's a notorious A-hole and literally the entire table hated him. Go figure. The old guys were getting so worked up about it they were being openly racist and physically threatening him. We had one small pot together where the board came out A5QTK and he checked to me HU so I bet with KKxx for some thin value and he commented to his neighbor and folded J9 face up lol.

But here was the real beaut:

Hero calls QQ25ss in EP (I know that's kinda bad leave me alone ), 2 others call, villain raises from BB, we all call.

Flop K43r
Villain bets, we all call.

Turn J
Villain bets, we all call.

River T
Villain bets, I raise, other two people snap fold, villain hems and haws and shows his neighbor how good his hand was then folds XD

I showed for the table lolz, and then he paid me off the next time we got HU when I had a boat.

Full Disclosure: Other than that I possibly ran worse than I ever have at a LO8 table before and lost a bunch while he kept hitting boats 3-betting hands like TT98 and runner runnering nut flushes to win about as much as I lost, so... really just another tragic tale of woe overall.

I am in the O/8 forum, right?

Sorry, but anyone who opens KKT9 UTG, then 4-bets a MP 3-bet, has been seriously misdiagnosed as "tight-aggressive competent".

(And this is why it is good to post results, at least before too long.)

Yeah if you read the entire OP you'd see I addressed that in the second hand, saying now that I know his range isn't tight. Until the first showdown his raising frequency seemed quite normal pre-flop and I had only seem him show down reasonable hands, so I had no way to diagnose him correctly.

Much good advice upthread but let's go meta. YOU DEMONSTRATE SERIOUS LEAKS IN HOW YOU THINK ABOUT HIGH ONLY HANDS.

I know this because in (1), your opponent's play with KKT9 (any suitedness) is atrocious but you don't mention it and because in (2) you capped with a hand that's among the very worst AA hands. What was the reasoning behind your raise? (Trick question.) What about your cap?

And for that matter (3) because these hands are completely different preflop. AA64 ss is almost-but-not-quite-premium mutiway, a monster HU. AAT9r is extremely marginal multiway, OK but not great HU, and pretty bad unimproved once the third low card hits the board.


Take some time to learn more about the theory of this game. In particular the ability to make a low, any low, is immense preflop HU. J863 is a mild favorite hot-and-cold heads-up against your hand. It can often win the low half and win high a third of the time. To scoop you'll have to both fade a low coming and fade that one time in three he wins high.


More generally, high only hands are drawing hands in this game. They want lots of opponents. They want to get in cheap. They want the board to come 2- or 3-high and they want all the low hands to chase crappy flushes or backdoor lows or, best of all but rarely happens, just fold the flop in a huge pot.

Occasionally I'll raise some great hand like AKQTds or AATT ds for pure value and to mix it up a bit. Consider those like KQs in hold 'em. I'd still rather have A23K ds even though its hot and cold equity is bad.

You're talking as though your opponent had holdem KK in hand #1 and you had holdem hand AA in #2. That means you need to work on your O8 theory.

This is a good post. I'd still limp bad AAxx when I expect the pot to be limped multiway.


You have systematic leaks playing high hands, so it's reasonable that you would hate aces until you improve this leak. Until you're better at this fold non-premium high only aces or AA8x, AA7x, AA6x where the x obviously isn't a wheel card. Call good high-only aces and pretend you're drawing at a high board or top set.

In the hands: #1 would probably call down anyway except against a passive opponent. Good opponents should bet down two pair or something like A2JT. You're not likely to have QT or a set so why not?

On the river it's very much a crying call and against some opponents I would fold figuring my two pair draw missed. Against an opponent you almost KNOW has QT or a set obviously fold at whatever point that is.

#2. Trick question because there's a good reason to raise if you think you can get it HU with dead money which is what happened. But in most live games UTG that's rarely happening.

Capping is very bad here. You effectively have a drawing hand and prefer a 7-bet pot where you can get away from AA ui more readily than in a 9-bet pot.

As played probably BF flop. Your pair and gutshot is bad on this board, the backdoor low is still live for half, obv any two clubs crush you and are never folding, and you're out of position laying insane implied odds. It's close to XF but you need to pick up the pot if he completely missed somehow.

I like almost everything said above, except you say that A23K ds has poor hot and cold equity. Is that really true? In what simulated spots?

Thanks. I'm pretty sure I meant to say it had worse equity than a best-of-breed high-only hand and just said the wrong thing. I was running some sort of sim against that really bad rainbow high-low hand. But truthfully I think I may have left PPT set to Omaha high.

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi Simulation

600,000 trials (Randomized)

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
Jx8z6y3w	39.85%	238,040	2,079
AxKz2x3z	60.15%	359,881	2,079

ProPokerTools Omaha Hi Simulation

600,000 trials (Randomized)

Hand	Pot equity	Wins	Ties
Jx8z6y3w	36.83%	220,969	0
AxKzQxTz	63.17%	379,031	0

Actually I'm surprised replacing two Broadway cards with wheel cards doesn't hurt us more in Omaha high. Weird game.

Fair enough. I come from a PL/NL background where I can often jam any AA and get folds or a flip. I am learning how to handle them better in limit format. You all would have been so proud of how passively I played my bad AA hands this weekend!

I only didn't mention it because I thought it was a given around these parts. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when we got to showdown. Now I know he just likes to 3-bet randomly sometimes, period. That said, there is certainly some merit to being unpredictable and hard to put on a hand. Tossing in an extra $10 here and there pre-flop to advertise how crazy you are (when he's actually tight post-flop) in a typical LO8 game doesn't seem like the biggest mistake I can think of... The kid gets paid off at showdown routinely.

My reasoning was I have AA it is the best hand let me put more money in while it still is. Same as any poker decision. Since then I've already conceded that giving away my hand in that spot is worse for me in the long run than getting the extra bet in. Lesson learned.

Sorry but you are very much stating the obvious here.

J863r is also way harder to get to showdown with vs. someone else's tight raising range. He can't call down with an 8x low or on some boards a 63 low.


Yeah good point. Until now I've always considered KKxx and AKQJ type hands to be as you say, but I still have a habit of seeing AA as the nuts, even though I'm aware it holds low value in LO8.

I'm not sure where you got this from. I definitely didn't mean to imply either nor do I think of them that way. His hands are jokes in both examples and I thought mine was marginal in #2 which I explicitly stated and attempted to excuse by saying it was 6-handed at the time.

Thank you for your analysis. I agree with all of this.

Re: KKJ9
Ah.... sorry, I was trying too hard to fit the evidence to the pattern of "Inexperienced O8 player overvalues high-only hands." It's been talked to death how your AAT9 hand fit that pattern so I overgeneralized. Thanks for not taking it as an insult.

Sounds like you know PLO8/NLO8 well, just not limit, right?

In a loose limit game, the advertising is not worth much. It's like buying the loss damage waiver at the rental car desk--you often don't need it because you're already covered.

Yes. I generally play tight and get paid off at the river routinely too, because the pots are huge by then. People will say "I know you have the A2" as they call with their 42 low and second pair hoping to get half. If you're game selecting well, it doesn't matter how tight you play.

Of course in tougher games you should mix up your play a bit more. Even in loose games, you should occasionally bluff rivers because the odds are immense. But one bluff every six months will buy you six months worth of loose calls. (Hyperbole, slightly.)

If I'm worried about deception, I much prefer to overplay QQ42ds with a three-bet rather than KKJ9. QQ42ds can hold its own in a shorthanded pot so isolating a range that isn't all AA has some merit.

Fair enough. We're all here to learn and I may have not seen all the replies. Didn't mean to belabor anything.

Yep! This thinking is probably second nature to you as a big-bet player.

Implied odds matters quite a bit less in limit games but still matter quite a bit in Omaha 8. By the time the pot's 15 or 20 big bets you're going to be calling down a lot of non-nut hands, so you want to stay away from the hands that get you in those nasty spots unless they can add value in other ways. But you know that.

My point isn't that opponents will show up with such a crappy hand here, but that even a crappy hand would be just fine against a high-only aces hand if they knew what you had. The corollary is, if you are heads up and think your opponent was counterfeited, you can call down with some pretty marginal barely-two-way hands.

Bonus corollary: I used to play a lot of online PL/NLO8 tournaments. At reasonable stack sizes (say 5 to 7 bb) and against any reasonable late position shoving range you should call off the big blind if HU with any four cards that can make a low. Numerous of the "better" players would fold way too quickly, which made those games fun to beat. But you probably knew that too.


Sorry. See above.... I was overgeneralizing to a common pattern.



More generally, I think way too much about what role hand histories have in teaching/learning poker. HH are great as examples of generalizable concepts! In my experience most 2+2 HH replies focus on how to play the hand in question, but the best replies consider theoretical factors of why you might play another hand the same or different.

So I err in the other direction.... too wordy and too quick to draw general theoretical principles!

Sadly my choices for game selection are nil as this is one of two O8 games I know about that run within reachable distance of me and the other one is smaller stakes. I wouldn't describe this game as tight as there are definitely a few spots who play 50%+ hands, but there are also several people playing trying to play right. I usually show them bluffs when I pull them off because they're fairly rare for me.

I guess I am one of those players because that sounds too gambley for me. I don't consider myself a nit but I am folding K963r to a normal ranged shove with 2k BB in and 12k behind. Probably 10k behind too. I get that the math is there to make the calls but there's something to be said for the value of your tournament life and not taking every possible flip when you can possibly get it in better shortly or have a chance of picking up blinds being first in. Then again maybe I just suck